Photowall for an Out of This World Room Makeover & #SpreadTheKindness Link Up #293

September 20, 2022 / 46 Comments

I am so excited to share the progress of my recent room makeover with you all! This room makeover has been in the works since May when Photowall reached out to me with a collaboration opportunity. But in May, I knew that we had a busy summer schedule that included lots of events and mini vacations almost every other weekend so I couldn’t commit to such a labor intensive project at the time. I decided there was no harm in asking the kind folks at Photowall if this was an initiative that could wait until September when I was already planning to turn Ralph’s bedroom into a game room and they readily agreed. The extension on this timeline was perfect because it gave me and my boys a few months to decide what we wanted to create for this new gaming space.

Photowall is the brainchild of brothers Niklas and Charlie Johansson who believe that the walls of our rooms have an effect on the way we feel. When they realized that personalized wall art was relatively limited in the marketplace, they combined their technical backgrounds with their strong interest in design to create something new in the world of interior design, digitally printed wallpaper murals that can be personalized and customized for any room with any design aesthetic. Without any previous printing experience, the brothers purchased their first digital printing press in 2006 and launched Photowall which has since become a well established company with is production site and offices located in Stockholm, Sweden.

With an environmentally conscious mindset, Photowall strives to minimize their environmental impact ensuring that this consciousness permeates every step of their business from production to delivery. All murals and prints are made to order which means they only produce what is necessary without any unnecessary back stock that could end up being discarded. The biodegradable ink that is used for printing is free of solvents and hazardous chemicals and any excess waste material from the production process is recycled. Their environmental policy includes more details on how Photowall strives to produce meaningful wall art while remaining kind to our planet and conscientious of their role in protecting it.

I was really impressed with the minimal packaging as well as the very small bit of waste that was leftover once we completed the process of hanging our mural. All of the scrap paper that was left over only filled about half of a plastic grocery bag…the ones that measure about 12″ x 21”. It was a tiny bit of refuse for a large amount of wallpaper and I immediately recognized and appreciated that commitment to the environment.

Now let’s get to the details of this room makeover. When we first moved into this house 5 years ago, we set up two separate bedrooms for the boys, each having their own queen sized bed in their rooms. The two bedrooms are connected with a door and you have to walk through Archie’s room to get to Ralph’s room which has a door that leads up to the attic. Well, for some reason, no one wanted to sleep in that room because they were frightened by the attic even after we took both kids up into the big open attic space that literally has nothing in it let alone something scary in it!

But they were still scared. So for the past 5 years, they have been sharing the queen sized bed in Archie’s room and Ralph’s room essentially became a guest room. Since we only have overnight guests a few times a year, we started realize that this room was less of a guest room and more like a storage room for a bed that no one slept in! And that’s when we decided to transform the room into a game room so we could move all of the gaming equipment out of our living room into a dedicated space for the kids to play and hang out.

Here is the room before the makeover. As you can see, it is a tiny room measuring about 10’ x 10’ leaving little space for anything except a bed, a dresser, and a night stand.

bedroom makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
bedroom makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
bedroom makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
bedroom makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
bedroom makeover, Shelbee on the Edge

We emptied it out, donated the bed to a young single mom of two in our community who needed to furnish her first apartment, and got to work on planning the new game room decor. If you have been reading my blog for a long while, you probably know that we are a family of space geeks so it didn’t take us very long to decide that we wanted a wall mural from the Astronomy & Space category. It did, however, take us a while to decide which spacey mural to choose because there are so many really cool ones available. We ultimately settled on the Blue Nebula mural mostly because we really liked the striking blue and purple colors and the trippy effect of the swirling nebula.

We decided to keep the entire room in these celestial hues. With purple being Ralph’s favorite color, he requested that two walls be painted purple with the third wall blue. I seem to have misplaced my paint sample cards so I can’t share the exact paint colors with you right now. After the kids headed off to school for their first day two weeks ago today, I headed straight to Lowe’s to buy the paint and got to work.

game room makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
game room makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
game room makeover, Shelbee on the Edge

I taped off all of the white trim with the intention of leaving it white, then I changed my mind and ended up painting the trim and the doors the same colors as the walls.

game room makeover, Shelbee on the Edge
game room makeover, Shelbee on the Edge

We decided the mural would go on the far back wall, the one you see as you enter the game room from the boys’ bedroom. When you order your mural from Photowall, you provide the vertical and horizontal measurements of the wall with an extra 4” added to each side to make the installation process a bit easier. Your mural arrives in equal strips of wallpaper that are easy enough to install and maintain the integrity of the mural image. Unless you have super crooked walls like we do from a century of the house settling. But my husband was masterful in hanging seven straight strips of wallpaper on a lopsided wall. I did end up painting the perimeter of the mural wall in purple because we knew how crooked the wall was and didn’t want any of the white wall showing through. I am really glad we had that foresight because there is some wall showing through in the top right corner but it is nearly unnoticeable with the purple paint.

While my husband is the first to admit that installing wallpaper, no matter how easy it is, it is still a very tedious process. But he did an amazing job and it only took about 2 hours to complete.

room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge

Once the room was painted and the mural was hung, we needed to find new curtains for the room as the previous red ones just wouldn’t do. I found these really cool blackout curtains with laser cut stars that filter the light into twinkling stars. They were only $15.95 a panel on Amazon and I needed two panels so it was not a very expensive addition but it has a really wonderful effect.

room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge

The room is far from complete as we still need to furnish it and hang more shelves on the blue wall to house the television, the gaming system, and all of the gaming accessories. We are also replacing the dresser with a desk and chair for the laptop and general work space in that room. I want to get a bean bag chair or two as well but these are pricier purchases that are going to have to wait until after the holidays. And we are also planning to replace all of the carpeting in the spring.

For the time being, however, I have moved the glider from my bedroom into the game room and then my neighbor just gave us this one piece of sectional that they no longer needed. It was the perfect piece to make this game room functional until we get around to completing it. You will see in the following photos that we have been moving the existing furniture all around to figure out what looks best. And our borrowed Halloween porch skeleton is chilling out in the game room until October 1 when he will be moved outside.

room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
The attic door.
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
The blue door opens into the boys’ bedroom.
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
Archie’s 11,695 piece LEGO World Map.
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge
room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge

The kids added their mini disco light and I caught this cool image while it was flashing around the room.

room makeover, Photowall, Shelbee on the Edge

And there you have it…the first stage of the bedroom to game room makeover is complete!

If you want to create a super cool out of this world space in your home, consider visiting Photowall to see their endless variety of options. The next makeover on my schedule is the boys’ bedroom which I am planning to begin in a few weeks. They have their silly little hearts set on this banana mural which totally cracks me up and so we are going for it!

Thanks for checking out my new room! Now let’s get to a link party.

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Shelbee

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*This wall mural was gifted to me in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own. I am an affiliate with Photowall so any purchases made through the links in this post will generate a small commission to me without any extra charge to you.

I am a midlife woman, wife, and stay-at-home mother of 2 boys and 2 cats. I have a passion for helping other women feel fabulous in the midst of this crazy, beautiful life.

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